Slightly less than a day later, he sees a woman on the road ahead. She waves.

"Hello there are you Ellayania's Acolyte?"

"I am! My name's Pascale. You must be zabna."

"It's a pleasure to meet you. Do you have any questions for me?"

"Oh yes, lots. What's your Institute like? Who runs it? Is everyone, uh, human-ish?"

"The Institute is a complicated organization and a very large one. The Explorer corps is full of motivated people, but it's not very competitive given how much of what happens is more or less down to luck. We don't know much about most of the worlds we visit before we visit them. The Institute overall is run by a group of people called the directorate. The directorate is chosen from among the people who achieve a rank equivalent to director or above by a vote of people who have taken one of the oaths of responsibility. There's some additional complications to how it all works but that's the short version. So far everyone in the institute either was a biological human or is descended from someone who was a biological human. Whether we all count as human is a matter for some debate."

"Was it started by people from a single world?"

"Yes, humans are oddly common on a variety of worlds. Many suspect that they were taken from our world in the distant past but that theory is starting to fall out of favor with some as we discover more and more human worlds."

"And you've never come across gods before?"

"Nope. Yours is some of the most, magical magic we've found."

"Huh. I'm not really sure what a world without gods looks like."

"That depends on a lot of things. There is other magic in the universe and many systems of magic shape the cultures that possess them just as much as I would presume that Gods shape your world. The world I come from and the world the Institute started on though, neither of them had any magic for most of their history. People told stories of gods and fought wars over what those gods supposedly wanted from them but there were, at least as far as anyone can tell, no gods for them to be following. Slowly and over the course of thousands of years humanity on both worlds invented new technologies, electricity, steam engines, computers, and so many more. My original world progressed slower though, they lacked some crucial evidence for a cornerstone of the biological sciences called evolution. And without that medical care and our understanding of many things was held back."

"How did that affect medicine?"

"Well it took longer for us to discover certain aspects of how things work, especially how infections mutate in response to the attempted treatments, I'm not sure the direct causality for other slowness in medical development. Some history of science people are doing a pretty massive study comparing the histories of the two worlds."

"Weird. Perinixu's the local god of healing. Her priests do writeups of whatever treatments they do, and if you get really sick, you go to one of her temples."

"That sounds effective but not really all that scalable or likely to lead to insights and progress. Hopefully I'm incorrect about that though."

"Well, we're sharing the tablet with them. We can see what they make of it.

"That's true you aren't on your own anymore. Given some time my superiors will start organizing a larger expedition and that team will be able to help construct a comprehensive plan for rolling out the technology the residents of your world want and the knowledge of how to use it responsibly."

"How long does that usually take?"

"Usual time windows aren't too applicable here. Your magic is more comprehensive and harder to analyze than most systems we've seen so far. That's going to make my superiors a lot more cautious. Still I'd be surprised if the survey team wasn't here within a couple weeks, and the working group would follow a couple weeks behind that. The survey team will take a census of your world, and check for any nasty hidden surprises, assuming they don't find anything that would threaten a working group the working group will follow as soon as they get the all clear."

"Will they be consulting with us on the rollout?"

"Of course, the technology we have can drastically reshape a world, there are limits on how fast we'll roll out certain technologies but we won't force any world to accept our gifts."

"Is there a unifying political body or is it just your Institute?"

"We mostly handle interworld affairs, in theory one of the old governments could do it but most of them don't have quite the political will."

"That'll probably make things easier. Arabek isn't exactly politically unified either."